At the heart of plastic and cosmetic surgery is usually a woman’s desire to recapture or maintain a time when the bloom was more fully upon her rose. Ever since humans learned to write, poets, humorists, playwrights, artists and even economists have been taken with beauty and its power. Below, we have rounded up some of the more notable thoughts and expressions on beauty from leading thinkers during the last four centuries.

I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?
--Jean Kerr


If there is one thing worse than being an ugly duckling in a house of swans, it's having the swans pretend there's no difference.
--Teena Booth,


In every man’s heart, there lives a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.
–Christopher Morley


Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing, then beauty is its own excuse for being
– Ralph Waldo Emerson


"One fairer than my love? The all-seeing sun/ Ne'er saw her match since first the world begun."
"Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight! For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night.”
-Romeo


Sex appeal is fifty percent what you've got and fifty percent what people think you've got.
-Sophia Loren


Whatever you may look like, marry a man your own age -- as your beauty fades, so will his eyesight."
-Phyllis Diller


It's beauty that captures your attention; personality which captures your heart.
~Anonymous


If to her share some female errors fall, look on her face, and you'll forget them all.
-Alexander Pope


"The love of beauty in its multiple forms is the noblest gift of the human cerebrum."
~Alexis Carrel


Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is nothing to be said about it. It’s like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all.
-William Somerset Maugham


Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.
-Franz Kafka


Beauty is the first present nature gives to women and the first it takes away.
- George Brossin Méré


A thing of beauty is a joy forever.
-John Keats


Do you love me because I'm beautiful, or am I am beautiful because you love me?
-Oscar Hammerstein II


There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.
-John Kenneth Galbraith


To me, fair friend, you never can be old. For as you were when first your eye I eyed, Such seems your beauty still.
-William Shakespeare


The pain passes, but the beauty remains.
-Auguste Renoir


Beauty is power; a smile is its sword.
- Charles Reade


Beauty is an outward gift which is seldom despised, except by those to whom it has been refused.
- Edward Gibbon


Beauty is only skin deep, but it's a valuable asset if you're poor or haven't any sense.
- Kin Hubbard


Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson


She got her good looks from her father. He's a plastic surgeon.
- Groucho Marx